Finally, my uncle’s oblates couldn’t hold off the black lighting any longer. Streaks started whipping into them, flinging them through the air and smashing them against the wall behind them; the impact killed them on the spot. I raised the four fresh corpses right away. Now I had six undead oblates, all able to channel the power of Death from the ground beneath this temple.
As I progressed, killing and turning oblates on the way, I noticed each level of the concentric circles seemed lower than the previous one. I also began to detect an incredibly foul smell that grew more pungent with every level we descended. When it had moved beyond overpowering and had become positively unbearable, I started to hear chanting. The sound was quite clear, so I was getting close to the center of this foul place. Which meant, of course, that I was getting closer to the final showdown with my uncle. I could only hope that he hadn’t sacrificed Lucielle yet.
I took out one more set of oblates on this level, but when I reached the door they were guarding I quickly saw that it was not like the other doors. This one was large and had a wide set of stone steps leading down into a huge chamber—and at the bottom of the chamber was the reason that this place was shaped like it was: a huge pool of blood, almost a pond of blood, a lake.
I stood in the door opening and looked around. Hundreds of corpses hung from the ceiling, which was almost a hundred yards above the blood pool below. The corpses hung by their feet, they were naked, and they had had their throats slit. They were in various stages of decomposition; this, and the blood lake, was causing the stench.
But there were living people too—hundreds of them, all tied up and gagged in cages around the perimeter of the vast chamber. This was beyond sick; they had to breathe in the blood of the previous victims as they waited to be sacrificed.
At the far end of the pool—tied to a stake and dressed in a white robe like the ones Bishop Nabu had used to dress his sacrificial victims in—was Lucielle. I recognized her right away from the sculpture I’d seen. My uncle was standing on her right, and another man, his face obscured by the hood of his robe, was standing on her left. Both of them held curved daggers.
Standing around the pool were creatures the likes of which I had never seen. They were the size of cave trolls—smaller than Frost Giants, but three or four times bigger than even the largest northern barbarian—but were grotesque-looking things. Their skin was red, bubbly, and lumpy all over, and their limbs were disproportionate and distorted—one arm might be huge and muscular, while the other would be withered, one leg jiggly and fat and the other wrinkly and lame. Their faces were like those of men, but were similarly distorted. In short, they were the ugliest fucking things I’d ever seen, and I guessed they were dangerous. Very dangerous.
Oh, and there were Blood Demons too, a handful of them, all holding red daggers.
Everyone stopped and turned to look at me when I stepped into the chamber with my zombie oblates.
“The beggar,” the hooded figure hissed, his voice vaguely familiar. “Destroy him, Rodrick.”
I saw a portal like the one my uncle had used to escape Brakith behind him. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to let him get away again, not this time—so I sent out a silent command to my oblates to destroy it. The hooded man, however, seemed to sense what I was about to do, and he screamed and dived through the portal just before the zombie oblates’ black lightning crashed into it, destroying it.
“There won’t be any escaping the fight this time, Rodrick,” I growled. “This is the time we finish this once and for all. One of us walks away alive, the other…not alive.”
“You may be stupid, Vance,” my uncle snarled, tucking his dagger into his belt and picking up his triple-headed flail, “but you’re one stubborn little shit, aren’t you? I guess those qualities often go together. No matter—we will drink your blood tonight and grow more powerful than ever. Come, fool, and meet your doom!”
With a roar, the Blood Demons all turned to charge at me—but I was ready for them. Knowing how long it took to kill one of those fuckers, I knew that facing multiple demons was a sure way to get myself killed. Of course, I wouldn’t have to do that, because this was the perfect time to use my Bone Prison spell. I looked at each Blood Demon, marking them as targets, and then I reached deep into the earth and called up Bone Prisons. Huge bones, jagged and sharp, burst through the floor around each of the Blood Demons, closing shut around them like the jaws of some massive carnivorous plant. The demons howled with frustration, grabbing the bone bars and shaking them furiously, but the Death magic was strong here, and they could not break free.
The huge Blood Ogres—that was the only way I could describe the red, bulgy abominations—now turned and charged. One of them picked up a man-sized chunk of stone as if it were nothing but a twig, and hurled it at me. I only just managed to dodge it as it whooshed through the air mere inches from me, and smashed a hole through the stone wall behind me. In response, I blasted a couple of bone shards through the beast with my Bone Bow—but they did nothing to it. They passed straight through it, leaving a hole in its body through which I could actually see the wall behind it for a moment, before the hole just closed up again. The creature seemed to be made entirely of congealed blood.
“Okay,” I muttered as the dozen
